Page "Lucretius" Paragraph 6

It's impossible to know the credibility of the accounts of Donatus and Jerome, since they wrote long after the poet's death, the latter author belonged to a theological tradition explicitly hostile to Epicureanism, and the sources of their off-hand comments are unknown.

However, if 55 BC is Lucretius's most likely year of death, and if Jerome is accurate about Lucretius's age ( 43 ) when he died, it can then be concluded he was born in 99 or 98 BC.

These are a lot of ifs, and it may be wisest to simply say that Lucretius was born in the 90s BC and died in the 50s BC.

This ties in well with the poem's many allusions to the tumultuous state of political affairs in Rome and its civil strife.